Arts & Culture

Discover All Things Regional in Central PA’s art and culture scene. Join hosts Cary Burkett and Joe Ulrich as they make artistic discoveries throughout the midstate. From music and visual arts to theatre, museums, literature and more! Listen every Wednesday and Friday on witf 89.5 and 93.3 for features highlighting the best and brightest cultural happenings in the region.

Juan Martinez grew up in Colombia, South America, jealous of the Star Wars toys the American kids his age had. "I had this gigantic appetite for all things American...and that translated later into literature. I just developed this huge appetite for American literature."

After his family moved to the United States, his passion for reading turned into a passion for writing, but it wasn't something he initially thought he would do for a living, even as he was doing his master's in writing. "I really wanted to be a film director, and I think I also wanted to be a comic book artist. It dawned on me when I was in my second semester of my creative writing masters that this was the thing that I really wanted to do."

And done it, he has. He's had works featured in McSweeney's, NPR Selected Shorts, Glimmer Train, Norton's Suddenly Fiction Latino as well as other publications. The piece he reads from in the audio below is an excerpt from "The Lead Singer is Distracting Me." Juan is now an assistant professor of English at Lebanon Valley College and will be giving a reading there from his upcoming novel "Extended Stay", a story about a hotel that's haunted but it's not clear by what. "It's very creepy," he says. "There are a lot of creepy little girls wandering around."

Juan Martinez will be giving his reading at 7pm at Lutz Hall on the Lebanon Valley College campus on February 20th.

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